Practical Applications of Multifamily Development: Can You Always Lease It Up?

Abstract

Practical Applications Summary In Multifamily Development: Can You Always Lease It Up?, from the 2019 Special Real Estate Issue of The Journal of Portfolio Management, authors Mark Fitzgerald, Chenchao Zang, and Will McIntosh (all of USAA Real Estate Company) seek to validate the conventional wisdom that investing in multifamily property development is safer than investing in the development of other types of properties, because multifamily properties tend to have short lease-up periods. The authors examine the distribution of lease-up periods for US multifamily developments from 2008 to 2018. They also examine how the length of a property’s lease-up period affects its rents.